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Trump Rejects Death Toll in Puerto Rico Reported by His Own Government Trump Rejects Death Toll in Puerto Rico, Accusing Democrats of Inflating Numbers
(35 minutes later)
President Trump on Thursday accused Democrats of artificially inflating the death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year, which officials said had claimed nearly 3,000 lives, and he inaccurately stated that only between six to 18 people died “after” the storm hit the island. President Trump on Thursday falsely accused Democrats of inflating the death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year, rejecting a government assessment that the storm had claimed nearly 3,000 lives.
Ignoring facts provided by his own government, Mr. Trump remarkably accused Democrats of padding the death toll “in order to make me look as bad as possible.” Mr. Trump inaccurately stated that only six to 18 people died “after” the storm hit the island and said Democrats padded the death toll by including, for example, a person who died of old age “in order to make me look as bad as possible.”
The president’s comments came as the government prepared for Hurricane Florence, whose high winds were already beginning to batter the coast of the Carolinas.The president’s comments came as the government prepared for Hurricane Florence, whose high winds were already beginning to batter the coast of the Carolinas.
Hurricanes typically provide a platform for elected officials to display leadership and strength. And a poor response, such as the government’s during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, can do significant damage to approval ratings. The federal government’s response to the storm that hit Puerto Rico has been viewed as inadequate — full power was restored to homes just last month.
Mr. Trump took to Twitter this week to warn residents in the path of Hurricane Florence to follow the advice of local officials and to be prepared.
And on Wednesday, Mr. Trump repeated his assessment that his team got high marks for the responses to hurricanes in 2017 and called the mayor of San Juan, who has been critical of Mr. Trump, “totally incompetent.”
Mr. Trump was criticized last year for a slow response to Puerto Rico, where the distribution of supplies, gas and food lagged and power outages lasted for months, particularly compared with a swift and efficient response to an earlier hurricane, Harvey, that hit Texas. It was six days after Hurricane Maria hit the island before he pledged to go there, even as he traveled to Texas four days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall.
The death toll in Puerto Rico had been officially recorded as 64 for nearly a year, despite convincing evidence that the figure was too low because official death certificates had failed to take into account the long-range impacts of the storm. In August, after a thorough review, Puerto Rican officials accepted a revised estimate of the dead as 2,975.
Mr. Trump’s Twitter screed was the latest in a string of callous remarks he has made about the deaths in Puerto Rico, which have caused even some of his allies to cringe. In an interview on Wednesday, Thomas Bossert, Mr. Trump’s former homeland security adviser, conceded that the president’s self-congratulation about his handling of the storms in Puerto Rico should have been tempered with compassion.
“The missing part was empathy,” Mr. Bossert said. “I wish he’d paused and expressed that, instead of just focusing on the response success.”
On the other hand, Mr. Bossert said, expressing the view held privately by many still serving in the Trump administration, attributing the thousands of deaths in Puerto Rico purely to the storm is a tricky business.
“The people that died — thousands of people — it’s terrible, but it’s always difficult to talk about the causality of that death,” Mr. Bossert said. He argued that the link between some of the fatalities reported and the storms might have been “correlative, and not necessarily causal,” such as in the case of a person with a heart condition who died in the months afterward because of lack of sufficient access to clean water, electricity or medical care.